Wisdom is the prime thing

I’ve been an Apache user for a while now. However, while researching some slowness problems with Apache proxies, I found out about some smaller web engines. One in particular caught my eye: lighttpd.

Testing it out, I was initially impressed with lighttpd’s (pronounced “lighty’s”) startup time and the speed of proxying. Reading up on it around the web, I learned that it has a good feature set and performs faster than even Apache for serving static files. It’s module layout is reminiscent of Apache’s, and the documentation has plenty of examples to get you started.

Configuring lighttpd

Primarily, I was impressed by the lighttpd configuration file. Setting up an Apache website, with virtual hosts, ssl support, php support, security, and so forth, is quite a job. Although there is plenty of documentation, and I am pretty experienced with it, I always approach the task with a bit of dread.

It was a completely different story with lighttpd. The configuration file is straightforward, with examples for most everything built into the file itself. I had a working server up in just a few minutes. The configuration file syntax makes it easy to create rules and conditions using regex pattern matching and booleans. It was actually a pleasure to do. That alone made it well worth my effort to learn!

Conclusion

Give lighttpd a try! After all, it is the web server behind YouTube. It’s light, easy to use and administer, and fast!

I just found about Firefox “Quick Searches”. Tremendous! This Lifehacker article details how to use them. I’ve already set up “w” for wikipedia searches, “i” for imdb searches, and can’t wait to add more as I see the need. It also means I’ve removed the “Search Engine” box in my toolbar for an even more minimalistic toolbar. Oh, and Ctrl-L gets you to the address bar, without needing F6.

The other thing I’ll have to look into more is yubnub.org…

I got to see one of these today: a robotic dinosaur. The Pleo homepage describes it as a “robotic baby dinosaur”. It has lots of sensors, and can be trained. I watched as it was trained to walk. It was pretty surprising when it was picked up and it start to nuzzle, coo in delight, and then fall asleep. The homepage has a little video showing what the dinosaur looks like and how it moves.

The Wikipedia article gives more details of its impressive specs. One interesting section from the article:

Recently, a video was releaased where a Pleo was tortured until he supposedly died. Most people doubt that he really ‘died’. However, it has been proven that extreme abuse WILL cause it to “die”, but it can be brought back to life.

There is even a video of this, that I won’t link to, but it makes the following statement:

We don’t recommend doing this. In fact, we killed our Pleo by the end of it. Don’t worry though. Eventually we got him up and running again, and after a few chin scratches and some petting he was his cute cheerful self again, so all seems forgiven. But just in case it isn’t, we now keep him locked in a drawer at night….

PS: Yes, we know we’re going to Pleo hell for this.

My Asus EEE PC is running better than ever. Mostly, this is due to following the EEE PC thread on the ArchLinux forum. These are the changes I’ve made.

Kernel

I added the following repository to my /etc/pacman.conf:

[eee]
Server = http://code.toofishes.net/packages/eee

From there, I installed the following packages:

• kernel-eee: A streamlined kernel for the EEE hardware
• madwifi-ng-eee: Wifi drivers for the EEE

These packages obviate the need for most of dkite’s packages, except for acpid_eee, which still works great!

/etc/X11/xorg.conf

I decided to go back to the i810 driver and the 915resolution package. That fixes the brightness issues. I think the X restarting problem I was having with an external monitor was due to my window manager more than anything.

In /boot/grub/menu.lst

I changed the default timeout to 1 (I had it on 0 for a while). I also added the following entry, and set it to be the default choice:

# (2) Arch Linux
title  Arch Linux
root   (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuzeee root=/dev/sda1 ro quiet

The important things to notice here are:

1. The absence of an initrd line. It’s not necessary with kernel-eee.
2. The addition of the quiet parameter to the kernel line. This makes the boot a lot cleaner — and quicker!

I came across an interesting site: http://www.phonetic.com that helps you come up with word combinations to help in memorizing a phone number.